Abstract :
In two years of leading agile projects at Avanade, an organization heavy in recent college hires, the author learned a number of lessons about how to be successful with junior developers on an agile team. Indeed, my most successful team has been my most junior. The author discovered that my biggest mistakes with junior teams were related to partially adopting XP. Where a senior team, by virtue of its experience, can adapt to replace missing XP practices, a junior team reveals the extent to which the XP practices form a whole and are best adopted together.